Solstice, etc.

I don't know if today (Monday) is the shortest day of the year or if it's tomorrow, but it's one or the other. I happened to look out my balcony windows, which face west, right after sunset - it was allllmost completely dark by 6:00 - there was a very faint glow left around the tree-line, but not much. So maybe tomorrow the day will be just as short, but at least after that we know they'll start getting longer again!

Added: I looked it up - the actual time of the solstice is apparently about 10 in the morning (my time, which is Central), which I think means Tuesday's sunset will be ever-so-slightly later than Monday's, right?

Let's see, as far as reading: I finished Sleigh Bells Ring, which was very low-key and nothing at all like most Hallmark movies that I've seen. Whoever wrote that blurb I read maybe thought amping up the drama would sell better? Anyway, it was pretty good. And I finished the book I've been reading off & on with the Regency Christmas novellas, which was called Under the Mistletoe. (That story I liked so much about the teacher and the viscount is "The Best Gift.") I have some more Regency short novels and maybe some more story compilations on my Kindle, too, so I may try to shoehorn some more of that stuff in while I'm still in the mood for it!

Somebody at work gave us both those holiday necklaces with the big blinking lights, and I draped them on the TV and put a picture on Instagram, if you care to look. (Mostly my Instagram is full of nail polish, but I'm trying to remember to take pictures of other things!)

Oh, I almost forgot - I meant to talk about those candles I bought from an Etsy seller, which came last week and which I really like so far. I bought the one 8-oz candle and a couple of samplers with 4 2-oz. candles in tins in each set. (You can see the bigger one and one of the tins sitting in front of my TV in that picture I linked to above.) Those two both smell really good - the small one is Wizarding Christmas (which just smells sort of generically Christmas to me, but in a good way - it says pine, fir, orange, and ginger) and the bigger one is At the Lamppost (I assume that's meant as a Narnia reference) and it smells like trees. My brain keeps insisting that it smells like snowy trees. It's blue spruce and birch, the label says. Those are trees that I associate with winter, I guess - I don't think either of those grows down here, much, so that's probably why I associate them with snow.